Minimum wage and CEO pay

Letter writer Michael Saltsman tells us the minimum wage is worth 6 percent more than it was 20 years ago ("Job-killer, thy name is minimum wage Sept. 16). That's less than comforting news considering the current minimum wage still won't allow a worker to be self-sufficient, even if he or she has two or three of those type jobs. This was chronicled quite effectively in Barbara Ehrenreich's book, "Nickel and Dimed," where she worked undercover at minimum wage jobs for a period of one year.

Yet we are told by apologists for the business world that improving the ability of workers for a richer life is a bad idea for America. We are warned to be afraid of pressing obscenely compensated CEOs to accept less profit, for they will be forced then to get rid of more dead-end jobs that cannot support struggling families.

Let's be honest, using statistics to support an argument against the minimum wage with no mention of the widening gap between workers at the bottom unable to improve the quality of their lives, and the unconcerned bosses at the top that never have to worry about their children going to bed hungry, is disingenuous.

Any evaluation of raising the minimum wage that fails to address this salient disparity is nothing but another attempt to start a smoke screen whose only purpose is to cloudy our ability to focus on this fundamental problem.